From pastabagel. Again, this is an email.
So I’ve decided to watch every horror movie that’s come out in the last ten years that’s supposed to be scary. I’m through a lot of them, and none of them are scary. But I have learned a few things:
Amityville Horror (the recent remake), The Conjuring, Insidious, and Haunting In Connecticut&#133 Read the rest

I saw The Vow, that was pretty horrific. But back and forth emails with pastabagel, and then this:

I saw Insidious. The first half was genuinely creepy. So if you want a good scary movie without any gore, watch the first half of Insidious.
Just turn off the movie when you first hear the phrase “astral projection.”&#133 Read the rest

To an American audience that is disillusioned with for-the-other-guy capitalism but hasn’t really thought the alternatives through, the opening scene is what their fantasy vision of Central Planning looks like: smiles, local produce and from each according to his ability, yay, though when Crazy Eye Patch Guy tried it last season it seemed fascist&#133 Read the rest

(another email from pastabagel, this time about the 12.1M viewer opener for Marvel’s Agents of Shield.)

Disney owns ABC, so I like the cross-platform brand synergy.
I like this picture of the cast. I didn’t see the show, but this is what I know. Sunglass Dad runs everything. The show is about the girls&#133 Read the rest

part 3 here
pastabagel uses the internet. This is less about GoT than about authenticity, and if you like GoT (as I do) don’t take this as a personal offense, look at it as a series of insights yoiu aren’t going to get anywhere else.
Also, note that these aren’t edited posts, these are copy/paste of his emails&#133 Read the rest

I sent a reply to pastabagel regarding the earlier email. He sent me this. I should point out that pastabagel sends me these emails not as “pastabagel” but as himself, and I get about two of these a week, this is how he writes all the time. There’s a genius and a madness in him, and it’s wasted&#133 Read the rest

As I struggle to write this porn book, I thought you might enjoy an email from pastabagel. The backstory is he refused to see it, thinking it was Lord Of The Rings again. I told him I liked it, give it a chance. He promised me attention to one full season. Here is the result.
So while&#133 Read the rest

Remember Metafilter’s most favorited user and former Partial Objects webmaster Pastabagel? This is the kind of emails I get from him, regularly and thankfully. The one below was in response to a link about easter eggs in the movie Man Of Steel. The shame is he doesn’t write posts anymore, I assume because of&#133 Read the rest

“You do what you have to do,” Charles Ramsey said as he described saving the three girls. We should be more specific: he heard a girl scream… and checked. And when the girl said, “I’ve been trapped in here, he won’t let me out!” he– you should sit down for this– helped her.
Only in America can&#133 Read the rest

(King Of Comedy at the Tribeca Film Festival, starts today, so I thought this would be appropriate.)
Chuck Low, in the background behind De Niro’s right ear, imitates Rupert’s movements. But why? Fans of the movie have long speculated about what it could mean, I think I have a clue: the deleted scene.
In the script, after Rupert&#133 Read the rest

(It’s hard to write about a show that has exactly as many viewers as commentators and make it interesting.)
This season, Don Draper learns what women already know: you can be hot and bitchy up until the time you are only bitchy, and then you better hope you’ve accumulated a lot of money or a loving spouse because people&#133 Read the rest

I didn’t see Zero Dark Thirty, but from the hype I’ve gathered that the only two things I need to know are that it may or may not justify torture; and that it’s made by a woman and has a strong female lead.
My point here is not the movie, but the fact that those are the two publicly&#133 Read the rest

Though I’m radio silent, this email was important:
After reading your piece, I thought you may be interested in this article [from Dissent]. I doubt you’ll agree with everything, but certainly an interesting / similar take to yours on Lean In:

Where other feminists focus on articulating the amount of free or underpaid labor that women do, Sandberg

“People are fed up!” I’m told. “People don’t feel safe!” Uh oh, I’ve heard that before, are we going to vote to invade all the states that start with Co? Everyone hates living in a police state until the moment they suddenly want a police state, and then they wonder why they live in a police state. Understandably,&#133 Read the rest

An interesting article in the LA Times about how the wives portrayed in cable dramas are…. hated.

Lori’s bloody end capped off a particularly rough year for AMC’s first wives club. When the once-svelte Betty showed up at the beginning of “Mad Men’s” fifth season carrying 50 or so pounds of extra weight, “Fat Betty” became an

A retired naval officer sends an email to his three grown kids about “being forced to live through the never-ending bad dream of our children’s under-achievement and ineptitude.”
The obvious first step is that the Guardian and Telegraph are papers for people who still write emails to their kids. So of course, anything where that generation gets to criticize&#133 Read the rest

Never answer a ringing rotary phone because there’s madness on both ends, but Rick does anyway and has a heart to heart with his dead wife, and the interpretation is that this is a kind of working through of the grief and forgiving himself, which would be right except that this is a show about zombies, so it’s wrong.&#133 Read the rest

If it’s about zombies, it’s about mourning, and we’re presented with two kinds of pathological mourning. First, the negation of the negation: we see the Governor in denial and not letting go– of his daughter’s hair as he brushes it, by sheer will alone he has ended her death and kept her undead, but this kind of grief results&#133 Read the rest

An observation, and I’ll qualify it by saying this isn’t me but the logic of the show: Totalitarianism doesn’t arrive by erosion of individual rights or worsening economic inequality, it comes because women want it.
(Non-black) Women will gladly allow total domination for the semblance of domestic freedoms– they’ll let an old man’s penis penetrate them in exchange for&#133 Read the rest